Carleen Kerr qualified as a Registered General Nurse and has worked in various areas of renal nursing at Guys and St Thomas’s NHS Trust for over 35 years.

Her last role before retiring in 2022 was Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS) in Advanced Kidney Care (AKCC). During her role in AKKC she noticed the over representation of Black patients on dialysis compared to white patients and that Black patients often spent longer. As someone from the same community she is passionate about empowering patients and saw an opportunity to support Black patients have a better understanding of relevant issues pertaining to their kidney health to ensure they had improved health outcomes.

Carleen is passionate to see more Black patients avoid needing dialysis and have a living donor transplant. She was instrumental in leading on a number of initiatives at the Trust to improve LDKT discussions for Black patients in AKCC and to explore treatment options such as living donor transplantation.

One such initiative she was involved in was the Phone Buddy Scheme a community led intervention co designed by GOLD to support Black patients. The scheme made a significant impact on Black patients that after her retirement Carleen joined GOLD as their clinical lead to continue supporting Black patients.